mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Do Phone-Use Agents Respect Your Privacy?

arXiv 2604.00986 ↗First posted 1 Apr 2026cs.CR cs.AI cs.CLcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not reveal exactly what data agents type into which form entries during execution. To make this question measurable, we introduce MyPhoneBench, a verifiable evaluation framework for privacy behavior in mobile agents. We operationalize privacy-respecting phone use as permissioned access, minimal disclosure, and user-controlled memory through a minimal privacy contract, iMy, and pair it with instrumented mock apps plus rule-based auditing that make unnecessary permission requests, deceptive re-disclosure, and unnecessary form filling observable and reproducible. Across five frontier models on 10 mobile apps and 300 tasks, we find that task success, privacy-compliant task completion, and later-session use of saved preferences are distinct capabilities, and no single model dominates all three. Evaluating success and privacy jointly reshuffles the model ordering relative to either metric alone. The most persistent failure mode across models is simple data minimization: agents still fill optional personal entries that the task does not require. These results show that privacy failures arise from over-helpful execution of benign tasks, and that success-only evaluation overestimates the deployment readiness of current phone-use agents. All code, mock apps, and agent trajectories are publicly available at~ https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MyPhoneBench.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

Builds on

16 of 25 references.

References · 16

  1. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  2. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  3. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  4. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  5. 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 449
  6. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 314
  7. 2024TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Modelscited by 280
  8. 2023Can LLMs Keep a Secret? Testing Privacy Implications of Language Models via Contextual Integrity Theorycited by 218
  9. 2023SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Modelscited by 189
  10. 2024PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Actioncited by 161
  11. 2024Attacking Vision-Language Computer Agents via Pop-upscited by 112
  12. 2024AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIscited by 96
4 more
  1. 2025MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environmentscited by 69
  2. 2024Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agentscited by 56
  3. 2026Seed1.8 Model Card: Towards Generalized Real-World Agencycited by 47
  4. 2025A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluationcited by 17

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026PrivacyAssist: A User-Centric Agent Framework for Detecting Privacy Inconsistencies in Android Apps ↗
  2. 2026PriMobiBench: Characterizing Visual Privacy Leakage in VLM-Driven Mobile GUI Agents
  3. 2026"Allow" to Achieve, Over-Privileged Inadvertently: The Unintended Cost of Task-Completion-Driven Pop-up Decisions in Mobile GUI Agents
  4. 2026SovereignPA-Bench: Evaluating User-Owned Personal Agents under Evolving Intent, Platform Mediation, and Consent Constraints
  5. 2025Mind the Third Eye! Benchmarking Privacy Awareness in MLLM-powered Smartphone Agents
  6. 2024Privacy Leakage Overshadowed by Views of AI: A Study on Human Oversight of Privacy in Language Model Agent
  7. 2026Mobile GUI Agent Privacy Personalization with Trajectory Induced Preference Optimization
  8. 2026AgentSCOPE: Evaluating Contextual Privacy Across Agentic Workflows